Planning Reform

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

I would like to add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) on securing the debate so early in the year. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I declare an interest as a home owner in the Malvern Hills district, which has recently been found to be the second best place to live in the midlands, but I think it was severely underrated in that survey. It is a wonderful place to live.

I have had the pleasure of attending two debates on the south Worcestershire development plan in this Chamber in the past few months—one on 24 October and one on 20 November—so I do not want to talk too much about my local area, but about national planning issues. I have some questions for the Minister. I agree with the many colleagues who said that we are in a much better place, as far as planning is concerned, than we were when we had the top-down regional spatial strategies so favoured by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop).

I completely agree with other colleagues who said how important home building is in our areas and how important it is for the economy, which is beginning to show signs of recovering from the dreadful recession we had under the Labour Government. I know how keen the Minister is to see the promising increase in the rate of home building continue, and I have some suggestions as to how we could speed up housing development by clarifying the guidance to the planning inspector. It is my view that the Planning Inspectorate is holding up growth in many areas, and we have heard many examples of that today.

In my area, we are a bit further on than the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome: our local plan was agreed by the councils over a year ago—as far in the past as December 2012. It was then submitted to the planning inspector in May 2013 and it took him until 28 October to give his interim thoughts on stage 1 of the inspection. That is a total of five months. He found that the duty to co-operate was being met and he had many good things to say about the plan, but he still wants further information and has rejected all seven methodologies presented to him for housing projections. We are playing a game of “pin the tail on the donkey” in the dark with the planning inspector and guessing what sort of housing numbers he wants to see. He has told us that the next stage of part 1 will start on 10 March 2014—a delay, with five months between that date and the continuation of stage 1. He has also written to me to say that he cannot give a time scale at this point for stage 2.

I wanted to see how long our process took compared with what hon. Members had seen around the country. There is a good spreadsheet on the Department for Communities and Local Government website of the 350-odd local plans currently in different stages of development. It categorises them by whether a council has published its local plan, submitted its plan, whether the plan has been found to be sound and whether the plan has been adopted. I thought it would be helpful to see how long the process takes. In about half the cases, the plan has been fully adopted. It is interesting to note that the time between a plan being submitted and being found to be sound has increased substantially in the past year. Since the national planning policy framework became live at the end of last March, the number of days between a plan being submitted and being found to be sound has increased from nine months on average— a normal human pregnancy—to 14 months. There is a material difference: the time period is not as long as an elephant’s pregnancy yet, but it is certainly increasing—the size of the mammal is going up.

My first question to the Minister is whether the delay—the increase in the time between the plan being submitted and having it found to be sound—is due to a national shortage of planning inspectors. My neighbour and newly knighted colleague, the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff), tabled some parliamentary questions at the end of last year. He was told that 80 plans are in the process of inspection across the country, which, in the Department’s view, will take 25 full-time equivalent planning inspectors, and it is currently recruiting additional inspectors. I would like an update from the Minister on the recruitment of those additional inspectors.

Secondly, is the delay since the NPPF became active a deliberate strategy? Does the Minister believe that it is encouraging more home building? I submit that that is a mistaken view. It would be helpful if we heard whether he had noticed any difference between the number of new homes bonuses paid out in local council areas that have an adopted plan and the number paid out in those areas that do not. Is there a statistical difference in the rate of housing delivery? Housing delivery will speed up and the arguments about planning will slow down if a plan is given significant weight in the planning process.

I conclude by saying that my thesis is the same as that of many hon. Members here today. The goal of the Minister, the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and indeed the country of delivering more homes and building local democracy into the heart of that process will be better achieved if the Minister told his inspectors to move immediately to give almost full weight in the planning process to plans that have been submitted and democratically agreed.